Scene and Act

Recently I have been rereading A Grammar of Motives by the rhetorician Kenneth Burke. For those who are not familiar with Burke, his work contains an entire arsenal of useful concepts and paradoxes, helpful in uncovering tensions within various philosophical systems. At the very beginning of the text, Burke asks,

What is involved, when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it? An answer to the question is the subject of this book. The book is concerned with the basic forms of thought which, in accordance with the nature of the world as all men necessarily experience it, are exemplified in the attributing of motives. (xv)

Burke is thus not so much looking at what motivates people, but rather how we attribute motives to others. “Men have talked about things in many ways, but the pentad offers a synoptic way to talk about their talk-about” (56). By contrast, Burke refers to claims about what motivates people as “philosophies” or “cauistries”. “Speaking broadly we could designate as ‘philosophies’ any statements in which these grammatical resources are specifically utilized. Random or unsystematic statements about motives could be considered as fragments of a philosophy” (xvi). Thus, on the one hand, a philosophy for Burke is a system of motives or an account of what causes people to act in a particular way. For example, I recently heard a woman claim that she supports a Clinton nomination because women are by nature nurturing and collaborative. What we have here is a fragment of a philosophy positing certain drives, natures, or instincts as the motive force in human action. A mirror of such a casuistry would be the conservative who claims that communism could never work because humans are, by nature, greedy and competitive. Again action is being explained on the basis of something internal or intrinsic to agents. By contrast, when someone like Foucault or Butler comes along, it is argued that these properties do not belong to the nature of agents intrinsically, but rather agents are produced or constructed in this way either by language, or power, or discourse, or something else besides. In this case, the explanation of an agents motive is no longer referred to intrinsic property of the agent, but rather to the scene in which the agent is contained and formed. It is scenic elements– what Badiou will call a “situation” –that account for the motives of an agent and a particular act, not something intrinsic to the agent itself. Here, “being-nuturing” results from a particular socio-historical situation that forms agents in a particular way, not from some sort of innate biological disposition.

It is clear that these different ways of attributing motives will have profound consequences for how we talk about various issues. If competitiveness, aggressiveness, or nurture are intrinsic biological properties of agents as the apologist for capitalist, a version of Freud, and this woman contend respectively, then the idea of social critique is moot from the outset. Short of some medication that would change these characteristics, the particular forms that society take are not the result of dynamics of power that could be otherwise, but are rather the result of our biology. The person critical of capitalism and envisioning another form of society would here be a naive (and dangerous) utopian, because our biological nature entails that there must necessarily be conflict and aggressiveness, as well as a distribution of the sexes. By contrast, if these properties of the agent are the result of the socio-historical scene in which the agent develops and is individuated, it follows that other forms of social organization are possible, i.e., that change is possible.

Burke’s proposal is not to take a particular position with respect to these “cauistries”– though one senses that he tends in the constructivist direction –but rather to analyze the various structures of these cauistries. Along these lines he proposes what I would call a “meta-philosophy” as a way of discerning the manner in which various ways of talking about motives are structured. Where a philosophy attempts to give an account of the nature of being, knowledge, and ethics, a meta-philosophy examines the structure of a philosophy to determine how it comprehends motives. We might say that a meta-philosophy remains agnostic as to the truth or falsity of the philosophy.

Burke proposes five broad categories (his pentad) to discuss motives: Scene, act, agent, agency, purpose. Acts are done in a scene, by an agent, often with some particular tool or means (agency), for the sake of some end. By Scene Burke is thus referring to the background or setting of an action. Agents, of course, are those doing the action. Acts are the acts done. Agency is the means by which it is done (a tool, speech, one’s body, and so on). And purpose is that for the sake of which the action is done. It is necessary to emphasize that these terms are extremely broad. Scene, for example, could be language as when talked about Lacan in the context of how the subject is formed in the field of the Other. However, language can be an act or agency in other contexts. Similarly, when Lucretius claims that everything is composed of combinations of indivisible atoms falling in the void, he is talking about scene. When Marx talks about conditions of production he is talking about scene. When Freud talks about drives and the unconscious he is talking about scene. When a religious person talks about God’s plan he is talking about scene. All of these are competing visions of scene. When Walter Ong talks about how the technology of writing transforms the nature of thought, he is talking about how an agency transforms the agent that uses it. Yet in another context, when Foucault or Kuhn talks about the impersonal murmur of language in which we find ourselves thrown, writing, archival texts, are no longer agencies, but are scenes.

Burke’s pentad is of interest in that it allows us to see, a bit more clearly, where the philosophy is placing its emphasis. For example, Sartre, Husserl, Kant, and so on, would be philosophies of the agent. The agent is placed front and center and other elements fall into the background. Most contemporary philosophies in French theory place emphasis on the scene, as in the case of Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Foucault, and many variants of Marxist thought and critical theory. More recently we’ve begun to see philosophies of the act, as in the case of Badiou or Zizek. And so on. In and of itself, this isn’t particularly interesting beyond gaining clarity as to where particular problems might emerge within a philosophy. For example, it is not difficult to see that the work of Badiou and Zizek is a response to the primacy of the scene in much contemporary French thought. Take the following passage from A. Kiarina Kordela’s $urplus, discussing Negri and Hardt:

…there is the so-called “Neo-Spinozist” line, which having long completed its critique of psychoanalysis, celebrates molecular and rhizomatic forms of identity, organization, and action. Although they themselves do no more than replicate the very structures of global capitalism, these same forms are presumed to also be subversive or revolutionary, to open lines of flught, or, in the more recent parlance of Hardt and Negri’s Empire, to express the power of the multitude (i.e., all of us). Drawing on a certain twist of Spinozian monism, this line operates according to the logic that, since there is only one substance, or since there is no exteriority to substance, the same substance must be that which sustains the existing politico-economical system and that which undermines it. Thus this line (inadvertently?) finds itself replicating the logic of the classical Hegelian-Marxist determinism, which presumed that the capitalist system is, by structural necessity, destined to bring about its own collapse…

Thus, far from involving any opposition to any oppressive power or even a course of action remotely deviating from the practices fostered by capitalism, the empowerment of the multitude, Hardt and Negri tells us, simply requires the recognition of the power that the multitude has always already had without knowing it. (2-3)

This sort of criticism could be directed at any number of contemporary theoretical constellations, whether we’re talking about Foucault’s difficulties in explaining how counter-power arises from power, difficulties among the “linguistic idealists” in explaining how it is possible to think anything new if we are products of language, Frankfurt school theorists who endlessly ape the questions “how could this be thought at such and such a particular time?” or self-reflexive questions about “how the critic is able to adopt a critical stances when that critic is itself embedded within the system?” and so on. These are problems that emerge specifically when the scenic element takes over as the overdetermining instance of motives or when scene is the ultimate explanans for everything else. Thus we say that agents are formed within scenes or situations (whether scene be understood as language, power, economics, social fields, etc), and that as products of scenes acts can only arise from scenes and return to scenes. Put differently, under this view it is impossible for an act to exceed the way in which it is structured by situations, for the act is a descendant of the scene just as the son is a descendant of the father (and is said to thereby share the father’s characteristics).

What is prohibited, it would seem, is the introduction of something new into the situation… Something that would transform the configuration of the situation or scene itself. What is required, it would seem, is the thought of an act unconditioned by scenes. Burke proposes this as the prototype of the act:

We are reasoning as follows: We are saying that, to study the nature of the term, act, one must select a protype, a paradigm of action. This prototype we find in the conception of a perfect or total act, such as the act of ‘the Creation.’ Examining this concept we find that it is ‘magic,’ for it produces something out of nothing. This enables us to equate magic with novelty– and leads us to look for a modicum of magic in every act to the extent that the act possesses a modicum of novelty. (66)

The paradigmatic act would be an act that is ex nihilo, completely unconditioned, that comes from nothing, and that produces something new. The question that seems missing from the scenic philosophers, despite their various “bells and whistles”, is this dimension of the unconditioned and the novelty that it introduces into scenes or situations. Rather, for every act– whether contemplative or in engagement with the world –the strategy is always to trace the act back to the conditioning field in which the act emerged. Yet we might ask, is there not always a remainder that resists this assimilation to the organization of the situation? Like Lucretius’ clinamen or swerve, is there not always something in the act that can’t be accounted for on the basis of atomic motion? And here is where Burke becomes most interesting, for his task is not simply to examine the ratios between the various elements of the pentad (scene, act, agency, agent, purpose), but to show how certain structural antinomies and paradoxes emerge whenever one of the terms comes to predominate with respect to the rest. In this respect, we could argue that even the most purely scenic philosophies will be haunted by the agent and act as ghosts that cannot be eradicated, even if only as “negative magnitudes”. The question would be one of turning these ghosts into positive magnitudes or making them explicit.

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19 Responses to “Scene and Act”

Frankfurt school theorists who endlessly ape the questions “how could this be thought at such and such a particular time?” or self-reflexive questions about “how the critic is able to adopt a critical stances when that critic is itself embedded within the system?”

This may sound counter-intuitive, but this is precisely what the first generation Frankfurt School theorists don’t do. They are responding to a situation in which the ideals of a particular kind of Marxism – socialised means of production, centralised state planning, etc. – appear to have been realised, only to reveal that it is historically quite possible to “realise” such things, without this carrying any emancipatory consequences in its wake. They therefore become intensely critical of theories of “scene” – in the sense that the reduction of agency to “scene” becomes, for them, the target of their critique. What they don’t do, however, is make the assumption that the reduction of agent to scene is a simple theoretical or conceptual illusion. In other words, they historicise the question of the production of agency, rejecting the assumption that the conditions of possibility for, or the nature of, agency should always be thought in the same way.

In this, perhaps without realising it, they were pointing back to Marx, whose development of an immanent critique of capitalism was not predicated on a metaphysical claim about the relationship of scene, agency, etc., but was instead a thematisation of certain specific potentials for certain sorts of agency that arise within this social configuration. What often gets overlooked in readings of Capital is the very explicit discussion of contingency and of phenomena that specifically cannot be theorised – such things are all over the text, explicitly labelled as such. The distinctiveness of capitalism, for Marx, lies in that its process of reproduction involves certain sorts of “necessity” than can be theorised: like the Frankfurt School after him, Marx takes this “necessity” as the target of his critique, and also does not believe that it will drive toward any automatic emancipatory overcoming of the social form. He does, though, think that a grasp of the ways in which this necessity is produced can say something about potentials for agency now.

I take Marx to be doing something odd with notions of immanence and reflexivity – with a methodology associated with these concepts that, in key respects, he borrows (with critical amendments) from Hegel: I do not take him to be endorsing the position that critique must account for itself immanently and reflexively as some sort of general methodological principle – I suspect he would take that as an indefensible metaphysical claim (certainly I know that I would take it as an indefensible metaphysical claim). What I think he is saying, in adopting an immanent and reflexive methodology in order to discuss capitalism, is that this particular object has strange properties – that the object is produced such that key characteristics, including certain potentials for agency, will be overlooked if its process of reproduction isn’t thematised through an immanent analysis that draws out those particular potentials – because, for determinate reasons that are specific to this object, another form of analysis is very likely to naturalise the object in ways that obscure potentials for transformation.

In this sense, Marx is repurposing Hegel’s notion of a “science”, and the methodology that accompanies this notion, to a very different effect and with a very different set of premises – not least with the goal of addressing possible challenges that his own theoretical approach is “utopian”. Marx is aware that the naturalisation of a social context can take a number of forms – most not as naive as the simple claim that things have, e.g., always been this way. Many forms of naturalisation understand the historicity or the contingency of the context, but assert, e.g., various forms of technical justification that things must be reproduced as they are: large populations require it, complexity requires it, post-traditional sociality requires it, etc. The reason Marx offers an immanent critique, in my reading, is not that he denies that agency could possibly arise in some way unpredictable with reference to the “scene” provided by the reproduction of capital, but that an immanent approach allows him to refute these forms of naturalisation, by demonstrating very clearly that the transformations that represent his critical ideals, involve the appropriation of moments that are currently produced in the process of the reproduction of capital. The notions of immanence and reflexivity in Marx’s work, I think, are aimed here, rather than directed to the question of how agency can or cannot arise in some prohibitive sense.

With reference to this question, it’s interesting that, when Marx decides to compare Epicurean to Democritean philosophy in his student work, what draws him to Epicurus is, in no small part, Marx’s criticism of the determinism of the other approach – something that Marx rejects as being a sign of the one-sidedness of the theory. These early interests should perhaps be a caution to approaches that want to read Marx as a theorist of the determination by the base…

I don’t know that contingency solves the problem here. Hegel is more than happy to speak of contingency (cf. the doctrine of essence in the Greater Logic), yet this is only to draw it up within the system. I don’t understand the rest of your post or how it is a response to anything written here. The issue here would be that reflexive positions end up reducing agents and acts to the scene, even as they attempt to think potentials for change. Such seems to be an unavoidable result for any sociologization of philosophy.

I take Marx to be doing something odd with notions of immanence and reflexivity – with a methodology associated with these concepts that, in key respects, he borrows (with critical amendments) from Hegel: I do not take him to be endorsing the position that critique must account for itself immanently and reflexively as some sort of general methodological principle – I suspect he would take that as an indefensible metaphysical claim (certainly I know that I would take it as an indefensible metaphysical claim). What I think he is saying, in adopting an immanent and reflexive methodology in order to discuss capitalism, is that this particular object has strange properties – that the object is produced such that key characteristics, including certain potentials for agency, will be overlooked if its process of reproduction isn’t thematised through an immanent analysis that draws out those particular potentials – because, for determinate reasons that are specific to this object, another form of analysis is very likely to naturalise the object in ways that obscure potentials for transformation.

Isn’t this claim far too strong, i.e., the claim that phenomena will be naturalized if immanent, reflexive critique isn’t practiced? On the one hand, I can certainly agree that such a form of critique can help to avoid naturalization. Yet on the other hand, to suggest that this is the only way to avoid naturalization, that one will inevitably fall into naturalization, strikes me as a claim that has far too much finality to it. For instance, I’m more attracted to the idea of certain structural positions within the social field from whence critique tends to emerge. Here one might think someone like Spinoza who is excluded from both the Jewish and Christian community, and therefore experiences both communities in a particular way (note, I’m not talking about individual theorists here, but a structural position). Or one might think about the French thinkers of 68, most of whom were at marginal teaching institutions and who therefore encountered French culture and the academic system in a particular way. These sorts of structural positions would be sites where the social system is riddled with contradictions and antagonisms, where agents aren’t quite in the social system (I’m not expressing myself well), thereby allowing a particular conceptual development.

I’m not sure I understand the bit about “general methodological principles” versus a particular historical situation calling for a specific sort of critique. As a caveat, I think it’s important to distinguish between the temporal and the logical when discussing these matters. Suppose one develops an ontology of becoming where all substances are eradicated and everything is understood to become. One can ask, “do the laws of becoming themselves become?” This would perhaps be a sort of category mistake. For the laws of becoming are a logical priority or condition, whereas entities that become are temporal in nature. A similar point can be made about historicization. It can both be conceded that the idea that agents, acts, etc., become in time, while also restricting oneself to a discussion of the logical structure of this becoming without bothering over the questions of how this particular ontological thesis emerged.

I think I’m a little less generous to Marx. At most I think he’s conflicted on the relationship between base and superstructure. By conflicted I mean that one can find tendencies in his work such as the ones you’re describing, while just as often one can find tendencies where base is pretty clearly argued as determining superstructure. This gives rise to a few problems. On the one hand, there are the antinomies of determination (here I’m not referring to causal determination). One can ask, why should economics have any more priority than, say, language? That is, there’s something arbitrary here. On the other hand, one can observe that at certain points during the last century the base did change, yet many elements of the superstructure remained the same. This places one in the position of either arguing that base does not determine superstructure (at which point you need a different theoretical elaboration), or (less plausibly) arguing that base did not really change.

I think there’s a further antinomy at the heart of scenic philosophies as well: we get other philosophies that place everything in the agent. Thus Sartre tries to show how it is the free acts of the agent that imbue the world with meaning, such that the scene does not produce the agent (but rather the reverse). Similarly, Heidegger shows how we’re only open to the world based on our care (Sorge) or the way in which we temporalize the world. In this cases we have, as it were, the agent “choosing” the world. Autopoietic forms of social theory argue something similar with their claims about selectivity and operational closure. I am not endorsing these claims, but pointing out that we have an antinomy of determination here, where we have two broad-based theoretical edifices that both appear equally able to account for their phenomena.

Thanks for this post – especially as I am about to read Burke for the first time (or, rather, I have A Grammar of Motives on my bookshelf; and now I’m motivated to push it up the queue a bit).

Coming from a sociological rather than philosophical background and sharing in the sociologists’ familiar stance which denies the possibility of a scenically ‘unconditioned’ act, I do agree however that simply dissolving act into scene misses out on an important dynamic, though that’s the direction in which our social theories often tend. Elsewhere, in a comment to NP’s post, you referred to ‘bootstrapping,’ which is somewhat in the vein of how I read Luhmann’s notion of autopoiesis: systems reproduce themselves, or not, out of their own elements – they bootstrap themselves into the future, just as participants to a conversation use each others’ utterances to take turns until they decide there’s nothing left to say. But even that’s too neat a formulation; I find congenial instead a view of social reality in which there are manifolds of turbulent interactions between different kinds and layers of scene and act, as well as agents and forms of agency, each colliding into each other in sometimes more, sometimes less scripted ways. A scene can give rise to an identity that then collides into other scenes or contexts as act, or agent, or agency. The novelty would then be a product of difficulty in observing stable and consistent interconnections among the various elements (though this would still not allow for anything such as an unconditioned act).

Given that I have specifically sociologically sensibilities in mind, this may not really be getting at any of your points.

It was interesting that as I was reading your post I was waiting for some sort of “religious turn” which came in the final quote of Burke. Curious as to how you were going to engage this I was wondering if you would further clarify (or link to other posts regarding) this statement,Yet we might ask, is there not always a remainder that resists this assimilation to the organization of the situation?
In your reference to Lucretius you are pointing to something outside of the immediate field of relationships. However, you are still speaking of an immanent framework. Could you further clarify your notion of novelty and the emergence of a ‘creative act’?

Okay. Let me see if I can unpack things a bit better, to clarify what I was trying to say in the previous comment. First: yes, I’m offering a specific reading of Marx, and it’s intended to be a generous reading, and a reading that draws attention to elements in his thought that are particularly useful for certain problems in contemporary theory. With reference to certain issues, I would defend my reading against a number of common interpretations of Marx’s work; with reference to others, I’m quite open that the text is at best ambiguous and my argument is more along the lines that Capital, Grundrisse and other works provide the resources from which one can construct a particular kind of theory – I’m agnostic on what Marx “meant”, but find potential in certain lines of argument in the text that sometimes receive less focus. I’m trying to distinguish these two sorts of claims about Marx – clarifications about the textual strategy of Capital where I think it’s clear from the draftwork that Marx did set out to do a certain kind of theoretical work, vs. conflicted or ambiguous dimensions of his work, where I am doing an appropriation of his work in the service of what I think is the more adequate line of theory.

These sorts of details are difficult to unfold in a comment and, I think, are generally fairly boring to anyone not deep in the marxological trenches. When I comment, I therefore put forward the main line of my own reading/appropriation. The point of this is not to dismiss other people’s readings of Marx. What I’m trying to do instead is to clarify the terrain on which I’m operating, so that it’s clear that certain critiques of some kinds of Marxist theories won’t apply – at least in a straightforward, assumed way – to the sort of work that I’m doing. This doesn’t mean no criticisms of Marxism would apply. I’m just trying to increase the chances of a productive discussion around claim I am actually making, and minimise the risk of being read as a cipher for some sort of theory of which I would also be critical.

Now here I have a dilemma, as to answer some of your questions I do need to get a bit into the trenches of my own work, and I am deeply unsure whether there is any interest in my doing this here. The short version would be to say that I was attempting to make an argument above that:

(1) I don’t think an immanent or reflexive social theory is required for all interesting questions in relation to agency and scene, even in relation to forms of agency that might unfold in a capitalist context; and

(2) I think Marx’s motives for adopting an immanent and reflexive approach are different from what they are often taken to be – that he was using this approach, not so much because he thinks it’s the best or the only possibility for thematising possibilities for transformation, but rather because (he thought, at least) it allowed him to demonstrate the non-utopian character of his own ideals, by showing how those ideals were being enacted as fleeting moments in the very process of the reproduction of Capital. In other words, unfolding a theory of the way in which certain potentials are constituted in the course of what Marx tries to show are necessary moments in the process of the reproduction of Capital, allowed him to refute a very specific form of naturalisation of the social context: a naturalisation made with reference to technical arguments that, e.g., capitalism is required in order to sustain a complex economy, or an economy on such a scale, or a post-traditional form of society, or similar arguments.

This isn’t, of course, the only argument Marx is making. It is, though, the major “cash value” he derives from his weird appropriation of Hegel, from whom he appropriates the “immanent” and “reflexive” structuration of his critique. Capital is therefore structured to unfold like a “logic”, beginning with an abstract category whose presuppositions are gradually unpacked in order to demonstrate how that category presupposes others, on and on until a “world” has been unfolded that can be shown to presuppose the initial category as its necessary result. Marx uses this structure of argument for a different purpose than Hegel. He uses it to show how certain other forms of critique are advocating positions that are utopian – in the sense that they can be shown as attempts to remove some feature of capitalism while retaining other features that actually generate the feature being criticised – and in order to demonstrate that his own critical ideals do not entail this same problem.

In this very narrow understanding of the terms “immanent” and “reflexive” critique, there is no reason to assume that any other sorts of objects will have the qualitative characteristics that enable those objects to be theorised in this way. Nor is there any reason to assume that this form of critique will grasp everything interesting going on, even within a capitalist context. This is all that I was trying to communicate by gesturing to issues of “contingency” above: that Marx will himself make carefuly distinctions about moments in the reproduction of capital that his theory regards as “necessary”, and therefore as things he can say something about through this form of theory, and moments that are contingent with reference to what he can theorise, and would therefore need to be theorised in some other way, or perhaps prove untheorisable, etc. My point was simply that there is a lot of explicit room within this approach for multiple forms of theorisation working in tandem on slightly different sets of problems.

On the issue of “immanence” and “reflexivity” in a broader sense, this is something we have discussed for a very long time: I think there is a difference between “broad” and “narrow” meanings given to these terms, where the “broad” meaning relates simply to how we go about doing theoretical or philosophical work in a secular framework, when the theory is not simply descriptive, but also seeks to inform critique. In this broad sense, “critique” need not be social critique (although it can be) and the reflexive element need not be made with reference to a social and historical context (although it can be). Deleuze in Difference & Repetition offers a reflexive critique in this broad sense.

In a more narrow sense – where “immanence” and “reflexivity” are offered with reference to some specific sort of social or historical setting – my position has been that it would ever be possible to construct an immanent and reflexive critical social theory if the context being theorised possesses certain kinds of characteristics: basically, if the context generates potentials for its own transformation is such a systematic way that these potentials actually become subject to theorisation. I don’t really see a basis for assuming that human communities must organise themselves such as to generate such a situation. In other words, I see no a priori reason to set up social and historical immanence as a hard and fast general methodological criterion for a critical social theory. Such a criterion, in a sense, emerges only in and through the demonstration that there are certain aspects of some socially and historically-bounded object that can be explained only through such an approach. Absent this sort of argument, and taken as a sort of pregiven presupposition, notions of historical and social immanence are dogmatic. Moreover, even where a particular context has the features that might enable aspects of it to be theorised in this way, there is no reason to assume that these aspects are the only things going on. I’ve described my work at times as attempting to grasp a peculiar “slice” of contemporary experience – I mean this in a very literal sense.

I’m not sure whether to indicate how I would respond to your questions around base and superstructure in Marx’s work – I’m happy to do this, but just don’t know whether it would be boring, or beside the point of what you want to discuss. These questions are interesting for me, and helpful, but I am conscious of drawing you away from where you’re trying to think.

On your concerns about my comments about naturalisation: my main response is above, where I try to clarify that Marx is attempting to develop a set of responses to a very specific kind of naturalisation – a naturalisation that recognises the contingency and historical specificity of the context, but that still asserts a kind of technical necessity for the context – asserts that transformations of certain kinds are impossible or would necessarily involve a sort of retrogression back behind capitalism, rather than a transcendence of it. Regardless, even in the passage you quoted, my language is not exclusionary. When I say things like “certain potentials for agency” or “very likely to naturalise”, I really do mean these terms: not all potentials for agency, not inevitably will be naturalised. I understand that it’s possible to read this as a stronger statement, but I am consistent enough in my position on this, that I don’t expect to need to worry about confusion to such a degree from someone who has been interacting with me for so long.

The main line of argument in Marx is that aspects of capitalism are self-denaturalising – they are relativised in practice by the dynamic character of the social context itself (incidentally, your side comment that “the base” has transformed a number of times in the past century, does not pose problems for Marx’s argument, but is instead a definitional feature of capitalism – it’s a dynamic structure, unfolding in and through transformations of other social institutions). The risk is that, with so much of the social context visibly rendered contingent, that the dynamic pattern itself would become, by contrast, more difficult to perceive. When perceived, there is a risk of misinterpreting the ontological status of the pattern in various ways. This tends to generate a pattern where critique and social movements direct their energies toward “overtly social” dimensions of the social context, the elements of social experience that are both more directly empirically observable, and that are also relativised in everyday practice, while leaving intact the more abstract pattern being acted out in and through the transformations of more concrete social institutions. The argument here isn’t that no one could ever conceivably see through this without reading Capital, but that Capital, by analysing these dynamics, helps cast light on why, in William Morris’ terms, we seem to experience a recurrent dynamic where:

men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.

Much more is needed for this question than what Marx provides – again, this has been something I’ve tried to be clear on from our earliest interactions. What I would like to do is attempt to think in tandem the sorts of theorisation Marx makes possible, with the sorts of theorisation that become possible in very different ways. I don’t see this an exclusionary – in a sense, and without claiming that any of our work will have any particular impact on the issue, but my subjective orientation to all this is that the stakes are too high to worry about excluding or shutting down any approach that might have something meaningful to add.

But this is much too long, and I realise that my discussions of my own work on your site can come across as off topic – and may be off topic, with reference to what you are trying to discuss. It’s potentially helpful to me to clarify concepts by attempting to articulate them and make some sense in a different framework. I understand that this may not be reciprocally interesting.

I read your comment over at Rough Theory and found that (somewhat) helpful. What I find interesting is what I see here as the possibility of the agent. Recent posting on a high profile theology blog was discussing a type of determinism of the agent supported both theologically and from neuroscience. What was being said is the someone first acts and then thinks (and later possibly understands). Despite the insistence of an active “God” in this understanding I see this to be a more immanent understanding of the world than what I hear you entertaining.
I know that you are not proposing the possibility of a divine agent but that you are talking about unaccountable (within the ‘scene’ that is) possibilities.
This may not be making any sense.

Gee, IndieFaith, why don’t you ask a difficult question? The difficulty with trying to talk about novelty and a creative act is that you can only do so retroactively. To say that something is novel or creative is to claim that something about it is unconditioned in the sense that it isn’t determined by the elements composing the scene. This is why God’s act of creation figures so well for thinking what a pure act would be (note I’m not endorsing the existence of God in saying this). God creates ex nihilo, out of nothing, and thus its creation is absolutely creative and novel. There is something in Gods scene that can’t account for God’s act.

How to talk about this in an immanent framework? I don’t know. If you can specify beforehand then you’re saying the act is conditioned. Even when we try to say retroactively that something new was created, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to demonstrate this because the novelty of the act always effaces itself such that it can be described in terms of elements of the scene or dispositions of the agent. It would appear that I’m over a barrel here!

Thanks Adam. I’m pretty steeped in sociology myself, so while I might sometimes express frustration I’m mostly just struggling with my own tendencies to sociologize everything. I think that Luhmann is a different can of worms with respect to other sociological approaches. In an odd way, Luhmann wouldn’t place scene at the center of things, but rather the agent. Here, of course, it wouldn’t be a question of the individual person or a transcendental subject, but rather the self-referential, operationally closed, social system. What makes Luhmann so different, I think, is his core thesis that agents belong to the environment of social systems. In this way he’s simultaneously able to account for the self-regulating functioning of social systems, while also recognizing that individual agents (persons) are themselves autopoietically closed systems that have selective relations to an environment governed by their own distinctions, such that they can’t be said to be determined by that environment. This would be worlds apart from say Foucault or certain variants of Marxism or Bourdieu with his habitus.

Incidentally, you might be interested to know that the socio-cybernetics list is about to begin a collective reading of Luhmann’s Social Systems. In case you’re not familiar, the group is quite good, hosting members such as Dirk Baeker and other luminaries.

Thanks for the detailed response, N.P. It helps me to hear you better and what you’re up to. I don’t have much to add to your elaboration here, though I wonder if I might impose on you a bit to say some more as to just what you have in mind when you make reference to contingency. In Hegel’s Logic contingency is one of the most mysterious and most difficult categories to understand. I’d be interested to hear just how you develop this. I would, of course, also be interested to see how you work through the issues of the relationship between the base and the superstructure while still maintaining a broadly Marxist frame.

Draw a distinction! as sociology’s first (and only) commandment: that might be the Luhmannian perspective, following Spencer-Brown, on the unconditioned act. Your response is a helpful reading of Luhmann’s social theory, and I think correct too – and thanks for the tip on the socio-cybernetics list, I’ll check it out.

IndieFaith: Hopefully you won’t mind my picking up on one of your points, to ease into some of Sinthome’s questions :-) Interestingly, this is more or less what I see Marx doing:

What was being said is the someone first acts and then thinks (and later possibly understands).

In other words, his basic approach is what I tend to call “practice theoretic”: he argues that we (collectively) do things. Since we don’t “do” with part of ourselves, and “think” with another, our actions always already entail dispositions, forms of embodiment, modes of being in the world, habits of perception, etc. – tacit, embedded in the practice itself. Those tacit dispositions form a set of grooves or habits into which it is easier for perceptions and thoughts to fall – thus making it somewhat likely that we may then generate other sorts of practises that utilise, and thus further reinforce, such dispositions – priming us or making us slightly more likely, all other things being equal, to recognise or respond familiarly to opportunities to continue practising what we already know how to do…

Later, we might look back on what we’ve done – using, among other things, the same sorts of experiential dispositions cultivated in the process of doing those things – and begin to reflect back on some this. There, perhaps, lies some possibility for conscious decision that can react back on our default practices. Marx would see his theoretical work as a contribution to the process of making possible that sort of conscious decision – he sees this as a conscious decision to appropriate potentials that we have constituted nonconsciously, unintentionally – in “alienated” form.

Sinthome – This begins to back me into the question of base and superstructure. A couple of meta points. First, Marx says in any number of places that he thinks that the ways in which societies organise their material production provides some sort of Rosetta stone for understanding other sorts of institutions that arise in those societies. I don’t think he quite means by all of this what he’s generally understood to be saying: material production, for Marx, is an extremely broad category that extends well beyond “economics”; Marx makes very careful observations – when he’s not being polemical – about the extent to which the generalisations he makes about materialism only become categories in and for themselves in our society, such that such categories can be read back into time, in his words, “only with a grain of salt”, and “with an essential difference”; and the base-superstructure language – while Marx does use it – appears alongside a large number of other sorts of meta-statements that haven’t received equivalent attention, which moderate both the way the base-superstructure language can be read, and also the importance that should be attached to it within Marx’s system.

So I can, so to speak, fancy up what Marx means by this sort of statement, and also suggest that it doesn’t provide the “engine” of his analysis in quite the way it’s sometimes taken to provide. Nevertheless, even after these sorts of manoeuvres, I’m basically critical of Marx’s stance, and I don’t think the actual operation of his theoretical work allows him to “cash out” these sorts of claims. I take a great deal of his analysis to be driven by the sort of practice-theoretic approach I’ve sketched above – and I’ve said in a number of discussion that I simply don’t see any basis for deciding that, say, practices associated with “material reproduction” should have some sort of qualitatively different impact on forms of subjectivity – such that these specific practices should form a “base” – than other sorts of practices.

What I do think happens, in a capitalist context specifically, is that the sorts of practices associated with the reproduction of capital become global, whereas other forms of practice do not, and that some of the dispositions associated with these practices have qualitative properties that can make their ontological status difficult to grasp, such that there’s a sort of structural risk of reading certain kinds of dispositions off into “nature” (human, social, or material) in particular ways that tend to deflect critical reflection away from them – and that both of these things can work in tandem to make dispositions associated with the reproduction of capital appear more fundamental than dispositions incubated through other sorts of practices (and, in a funny way, this can then become its own self-fulfilling prophecy, of course, as what we treat as more fundamental in collective practice, of course becomes more fundamental). This is not for me, however, some sort of “Rosetta Stone” argument – even in relation to capitalist society – but more an attempt to understand why, in practice, priorities that we regard as “economic”, and the discourses through which we articulate such priorities, seem in practice to carry the weight that they do on a global scale.

In terms of what Marx does in Capital – rather than in terms of his isolated metatheoretical statements about what he takes himself to be doing: he breaks the process of the reproduction of capital down into moments, organises those moments as a “logic” – unfolding more concrete categories by tracing back presuppositions from more abstract categories – and, within the analysis of each category, explores the forms of subjectivity or dispositions associated with the practical enactment of each category. So, for example, the opening chapter of Capital, for example, begins with the commodity as a “thing outside us”. We only learn several chapters in, once Marx has derived the category of wage labour, that this opening always already presupposed the existence of commodities of the human sort – and, therefore, the opening is intended to express forms of subjectivity or modes of being in the world, in a context in which the practice of the sale of our own labour power gives most of us practical experience with treating our capacities, our potential, as an object that we own and can alienate – such that part of ourselves becomes plausibly experienced as a thing outside us. The opening theoretical perspective – the distant objective sociological gaze with which Capital begins – is expressive, in part, of such a disposition (it’s more complicated than this, as other categories are also presupposed – I’m abbreviating).

The chapter then moves into a meta-commentary on Descartes’ wax :-) The category of abstract labour is introduced as a category of a supersensible property that lies behind the flux of sense experience. The movement of the chapter thus tracks the movement of, say, Hegel’s Phenomenology, in the shift from Perception to Understanding. Once again, we learn in later chapters that we are discussing forms of being in the world, linked back to practical experiences associated with the treatment of ourselves (and other things) as commodities: the value of a commodity is not evident from the amount of labour empirically expended in its production – the value is, in fact, unknown, until established “objectively” through the act of exchange. Marx suggests that this practical experience involves a collective enactment of a supersensible essence – such that, for example, the possibility that humans share some common, qualitatively homogeneous “substance”, in spite of their various empirical differences, is here enacted in social practice – constituting, then, a potential reservoir of critical experience that can potentially be wielded against social institutions and practices predicated on the intrinsic inequality of humans. (Again, the argument is much more complicated than this, and I’m truncating severely.)

So the argument here involves a kind of (non-functionalist) Durkheimian exploration of the ways in which collective practices constitute certain social properties, substances, entities, etc., which are “real” to the extent that we are collectively behaving as if they exist, and thereby constituting such things in practice.

The main line of Marx’s argument – and this will begin to get back to your questions about coningency – traces what Marx regards as the “necessary” moments in the reproduction of capital: “necessary” moments are those definitive of capital. Forms of being in the world associated with these necessary moments are unfolded as the moments themselves are analysed. Occasionally Marx will also briefly explore possible moments – things that are likely to happen in the right circumstances, etc. He generally reins the text back in quickly when he does this, as his aim is to show what is necessarily constituted. The argument about necessity here does not take the form of a base-superstructure analysis, but is instead practice theoretic: we do certain things, and the process of “doing” already involves practical sensibilities – which might involve, e.g., enactments of a certain kind of social equality, or enactments of a mind/body dualism effected in practice, or enactments of a supersensible world that supervenes on the world of empirical sensibility, etc. These sorts of socially enacted entities are our “fetishes” – socially enacted entities whose connections to our own collective practices have become obscured, and which therefore confront us in “alienated” form.

Logically – and here speaking in my own voice, not Marx’s – an argument that such things arise in the course of practices that reproduce capitalism, does not preclude an argument that such things also arise in other forms, in other sorts of practices. I may learn an ideal of equality, for example, in school, or from my parents, or in some other way, long before I experience the sorts of tacit embodied dynamics that Marx analyses when he looks at value. It is actually important for a critical theory that alternative enactments of these dispositions be possible: otherwise, it wouldn’t be possible to separate such things out from capitalism, and use them critically against this social form. The “payoff” to establishing that certain things are also enacted via the practices that reproduce capitalism, is simply that it becomes possible to say that, as long this social form is reproduced, then there is at least one way that certain dispositions will continue to be enacted, whether or not other sorts of social institutions enact those dispositions in other ways. Nevertheless, as a matter of practical political concern, I suspect it would be quite important to expand the ways in which critical dispositions can be enacted and experienced in a wide range of practices in many different kinds of institutional settings, if we want those dispositions to become powerful enough to effect meaningful change across a social context. Many of the dispositions Marx traces via his analysis of the reproduction of capital are deeply tacit, so long as they are expressed only in that one slice of social experience.

I may not be being direct enough about how I see all this speaking to the question about base/superstructure. Marx tends to mobilise a certain Hegelian vocabulary to treat, say, legal forms or political ideals as “reflections” of the sorts of practices I’ve been talking about above. This use of the term “reflection” is often translated by other commentators into a sort of sociologised base/superstructure analysis, such that the superstructure becomes a “reflection” of the base in, I suspect, a somewhat different sense than Marx is after. I suspect this introduces a slightly different set of connotations than Marx is after – his language and, I suspect, his intentions here are more Hegelian and, since I hear a great deal of Capital as a sort of critique of a facile essence/appearance distinction, such that the work spends a lot of time talking about the necessary relationship connecting essences and their forms of appearance, I have a sense that much of the translation of this into base/superstructure terms is missing a core element of Marx’s argument (Marx himself doesn’t use base/superstructure language often, although it is there). To make this argument convincingly, I would need to play off against a specific base-superstructure inflection of Marx’s work – I’m not sure that’s worthwhile for present purposes. Hopefully this comment provides enough of a sense of where I might go instead.

In terms of your questions on contingency: I’d be interested in discussing this in relation to Hegel, but I have no real “reading” of Hegel on this issue – as in, I agree with you that it’s both extremely interesting and incredibly complex, and I have no resolved positions. On one level, contingency in Marx is fairly simple: since he is tracing only what he regards as “necessary” (definitional) moments in the process of the reproduction of capital, anything else is “contingent” with reference to what can be theorised by his approach. In some cases, this contingency is quite literally aleatory – when illustrating his points, for example, Marx will often talk about things like crop failures, famines, wars, etc. – which are clearly presented as external to what he is theorising. Such aleatory events often play pivotal roles in how things play out on the ground – and this is explicitly acknowledged in the text.

On another level, there are certain forms of what are essentially “structural contingency” that are to some degree encompassed within the analysis: certain aspects of the reproduction of capital that “necessarily” create certain forms of contingency in the sense that the outcome cannot be predetermined by this theory, but the theory nevertheless provides grounds to expect a recurrence a certain forms of conflict, crisis, etc. The paradigmatic example involves contestations over the length of the working day – where Marx opens both the intrinsic structural possibility for a certain form of dispersed conflict, the sorts of identities and discourses likely to arise in the course of the conflict, restrictions on the form in which such conflicts can be resolved, and the consequences of those sorts of resolutions – but can say nothing about which empirical social actors will participate in or “win” any particular contestation: “between equal rights, force decides” – the story of the “force” used in this chapter, for and against the campaign for the normal working day, is full of aleatory events – a fact underscored by the discussion, after the main narrative which relates to England, about the very different ways such things play out in other countries. In this story, the theoretical approach both is and isn’t useful – it can help make sense of aspects of this conflict, but it also leaves a great deal unexplained.

Marx doesn’t seem troubled by this – and this position is, I think, consistent with other comments he makes about on-the-ground assertions of agency: he responds at some point to critics who want him to say more about the revolution and what sort of society should succeed capitalism, by arguing that it’s not his intention to make recipes for the cook shops of the future. What he does, instead, in Capital, is draw attention to certain potentials we have constituted unawares, while also trying to make sense of what capitalism is, so that we aren’t confusing the sorts of dynamic transformations through which capitalism reproduces itself, with transformations that involve a more emancipatory appropriation of alienated potentials in the construction of new forms of social life.

Sorry to go on for so long. I suspect you could say much more interesting things than I can in relation to contingency in Hegel – and I would be interested in having that discussion, if you feel like sketching out what you think on the issue. On a more general level, I’d like to hear your criticisms of Hegel – this is one of the things I’ve tried to work through with Marx, whether he distances himself from Hegel sufficiently in his appropriation, and it would be really useful to me to think through what Hegel himself is doing in a more adequate way. Other things, though, may strike you as more interesting to discuss – that’s fine. Not trying to predetermine the lines of conversation, but just to express an interest in further discussion.

Thanks for the comments they were helpful even if they of course did not solve anything. As I understand it then this view is not so different from some of the theological perspectives I was referring to as in these “new acts” there is no prior (explicitly connected) intention on the part of the agent.

N.P., I think you’ve written a precis of an entire research project here. All I can rather lamely say is thank you. It’s been quite a while since I’ve muddled over Hegel’s category of contingency, so I don’t have anything interesting to say about it right now, but I think what you say above hits the mark. It seems to me that these aleatory dimensions as “selective mechanisms” are often overshadowed or hidden when strong structural approaches are adopted that reify capitalism as an entity rather than a process.

[…] under Uncategorized Sinthome over at Larval Subjects has been kicking around some ideas of scene, act and agency; there’s a response, too, at Rough Theory. His latest post, however, is the one that really […]

[…] agency has been underway for some days now, spiralling out from Sinthome’s original post on Scene and Act (readers from here might be amused at the thesis precis I seem to have decided to write in the […]

Forgive my broken english, I am not able to unfold all the thougts that this post provoque me (spanish is my native language). I find that the elements of Burke´s pentad are very framed: for example, saying “act” leads us to an individual frame that concerns more to an “actor” than to the agent. The same applies to the “scene” if we want to refer to a “situation”. I find this terms pretty mixed up when its desirable to unframe them in order to introduce enunciation as a significative strata that folds and sediments history. Maybe if we consider this pentad elements without such analitic frames, we can grasp discoursive magnitudes. When the agent execercises or embodies pharresia beyond the situation where its sumerged, the historical sediments begin to flow and the power relations loose their heaviness. Thats foucault`s ultimate lesson.